During an exclusive townhall meeting with President Obama, MSNBC and Telemundo host and townhall moderator José Díaz-Balart twice pressed President Obama to further expand his administration’s controversial new policy to exempt millions of unauthorized immigrants from the application of the nation’s immigration laws.
Following up on a question from a university student from Haiti who asked the President to include international students like himself in the President’s new policy, Díaz-Balart pressed the President on the possibility of expanding the administration’s non-enforcement policies beyond the “undocumented population.”
“Could you not also include…folks from Haiti, this horrible earthquake that hit five years ago, are you focused at all on that?” queried Díaz-Balart from left field. Answering Díaz-Balart, the President acknowledged that such a move would effectively be an abuse of executive prosecutorial discretion.
“We can’t violate statutes. We can’t violate laws that are already in place,” said Obama, whose actions are being legally challenged precisely, in part, on the basis that they constitute a massive abdication of the responsibility of the nation’s Chief Executive to “faithfully execute the laws of the United States.”
After a “Dreamer” questioner (a young person brought to the U.S. by an unauthorized immigrant parent) expressed her frustration that her Mom is still subject to deportation, Díaz-Balart insisted “Why cannot you include the parents of these Dreamers? And if the Judges say that isn’t legal or constitutional, you deal with it then, but include them.”
Once again, the question forced the President to acknowledge that by definition, prosecutorial discretion in enforcement of the law must be the exception, not the norm. “If I include everybody, then it’s no longer prosecutorial discretion, then I’m just ignoring the law,” Obama said.
“There are only so many shortcuts” to immigration reform, the President went on to declare a short time later.
Earlier during the townhall, the President also refused to acknowledge the reality that he could have led passage of a Democrat-sanctioned reform of the nation’s’ immigration laws when his party held a veto-proof majority in Congress , the same majority he used to pass his Affordable Care Act. “We wanted immigration done. We pushed for immigration to be done. But ultimately, we could not get the votes to get it all done,” the President insisted when discussing the matter.
